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Adobe InDesign Help
Producing Consistent Color
Using Help
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Contents
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Creating a viewing environment for color management
Your work environment influences how you see color on your monitor and in printed
output. For best results, control the colors and the light in your work environment by
doing the following:
•
View your documents in an environment that provides a consistent light level and color
temperature. For example, because the color characteristics of sunlight change
throughout the day and alter the way colors appear on your screen, keep shades closed
or work in a windowless room. To eliminate the blue-green cast from fluorescent
lighting, consider installing D50 (5000-degree Kelvin) lighting. Ideally, view printed
documents in a D50 lightbox.
•
View your documents in a room with neutral-colored walls and ceiling. A room’s color
can affect the perception of both monitor color and printed color. The best color for a
viewing room is polychromatic gray. Also, the color of your clothing reflected in the
glass of your monitor may affect the appearance of on-screen colors.
•
Match the light intensity in the room or lightbox to the light intensity of your monitor.
View continuous-tone art, printed output, and on-screen images under the same
intensity of light.
•
Remove colorful background patterns on your monitor desktop. Busy or bright patterns
surrounding a document interfere with accurate color perception. Set your desktop to
display neutral grays only.
•
View document proofs in the real-world conditions in which your audience will see the
final piece. For example, you might want to see how a housewares catalog looks under
the incandescent light bulbs used in homes, or view an office furniture catalog under
the fluorescent lighting used in offices. However, always make final color judgments
under the lighting conditions specified by the legal requirements for contract proofs in
your country.
Turning on and setting up color management
InDesign simplifies the task of setting up a color-managed workflow by gathering most
color management controls in a single Color Settings dialog box. Rather than adjusting
each control manually, you can choose from a list of predefined color management
settings. Each predefined configuration includes a set of color management options
designed to produce consistent color for a common publishing workflow, such as prepa-
ration for Web or domestic prepress output. These predefined configurations can also serve
as starting points for customizing your own workflow-specific configurations.
InDesign also uses color management policies, which determine how to handle color data
that don’t immediately match your current color management workflow. Policies are
designed to clarify the color management decisions you need to make when you open a
document or import color data into an active document.
Keep in mind that you must specify color management settings
before
opening or
creating files in order for the settings to take effect in those files.
Note:
InDesign supports color management for files that use either the RGB, CMYK, or LAB
color model. InDesign doesn’t support color management for the grayscale color model,
or for spot colors as long as the spot colors aren’t converted to process color equivalents. If